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Will Machines Ever Achieve Consciousness?

Biocentrism holds the key to artificial intelligence

Stephen Hawking recently said we should be very wary of developing “full artificial intelligence” as it “could spell the end of the human race.” His doomsday musings were hardly original. SpaceX’s Elon Musk had said the same thing earlier the same year, warning that it’s “potentially more dangerous than nukes.” The idea of computers possessing consciousness was first termed “the Singularity” by computer scientist Vernor Vinge, who believed it would lead to “change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.”

Of course, computers already control and facilitate much of our daily lives from banking to robotic automobile assembly, and no one wants to return to the old days of manual drudgery for menial tasks like repetitive spot welding. Major advances are reported annually. However, the fear is that AI will someday reach a point of complexity where the machines become self-aware. We’ve seen this theme in films like the Terminator series Westworld and in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But what is the basis of consciousness? If complex electrical circuitry plays a key role, well, computers are obviously getting that. With supercomputers improving their capabilities, and speeds of 4 exaflops (or 4 × 1018 calculations per second) expected by 2020, might we actually arrive at the Singularity? Will we then share Earth with another intelligence, possibly forever?

It’s easy to assume that if consciousness is generated by an electrical current that stimulates appropriate neural inputs, well, machines use electrical circuits, so we’re halfway home. Many regard awareness as a mere ancillary property of life, a casual characteristic that evolution produced to give complex life forms an advantage. They seem unaware that consciousness is a profound issue. Without any exaggeration, it may well be characterized—as Paul Hoffman, former Encyclopedia Britannica publisher once said—as the deepest and most important in all of science.

The issue has plagued scientists and thinkers through the ages. Thomas Henry Huxley, one of Darwin’s advocates, said that consciousness “is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.” Others think awareness can be described in physical terms, such as the sum total of neural processes in the brain.

The hard problem, which eludes general public awareness, is explaining how and why we have subjective experiences at all, such as seeing and hearing. Somehow (according to the mainstream view) the inanimate materials that comprise our bodies—carbon and atoms—find a way to bestow on us the experience of feelings.

Now, it’s assumed that cars and rocks have no feelings and cannot “enjoy” the warm sunlight striking their surfaces. Yet we savor the smell of fresh-cut grass, feel pain if pinched, experience thoughts, and sense the rich crimson of a sunset. We feel. How and why? It’s the most basic kind of question, yet it has no answer to date.

The depth and profundity of this goes to the heart of biocentrism, and to the paranoia over possible computer Singularities, and to the very quest to apprehend the cosmos. Nothing escapes the sweaty grip of perception. Yet, we don’t know how consciousness arises. Indeed, even Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg conceded that there’s a problem with consciousness: Its existence doesn’t seem to be derivable from physical laws.

According to biocentrism, time and space are the language of consciousness — the inner and outer forms of our intuition, respectively, which give the world its order, meaning and sense. We instinctively know that they aren’t things, like your iPhone or the pebbles we pick up along the seashore. There’s a peculiar intangibility about them. That is because they are simply the tools our mind uses to put everything all together. The situation is something like that of playing a CD. The CD itself contains only information, yet when you turn the player on, the information leaps into three-dimensional sound. Only in that way does the music indeed exist.

We may believe consciousness has a home in our brains, and there’s a relative truth to that, but not an absolute one, because the brain itself is as much a construction in our minds as the supposedly external trees, TVs and laptops. If so, then what’s really out there? Experiments show nothing is, until it’s perceived. Indeed, Einstein’s colleague John Wheeler, who coined the word “black hole,” once said, “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”

What we observe and experience is a whirl of information in our mind, assembled by algorithms attuned to particular electromagnetic frequencies. Touch the table top and it feels solid. But no solids are ever contacted. Rather, the outermost atoms of your skin are surrounded by negatively charged electrons, and these are repelled by the similar electrons in the table. The sense of solidity is illusory. Fields. Energies. Nothing solid, ever. And it all occurs in the mind, which creates brightness, depth, and a sense of space (location) and time. Even in dreams, our mind can assemble information into a 4D spatio-temporal experience. The universe itself can be viewed as a probabilistic state of potential information, which the observer “collapses” into actual information and sensations. It’s a unitary process that bestows the feeling of a “me”—the sense of being.

Let Emerson’s words suffice, that “the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative.” Until we understand this, a machine can never be made to replicate the mind of a man, or even a dog or a pigeon. For an object—a machine, a computer—there’s no other principle but physics and the chemistry of the atoms that compose it. Unlike you and I, they can never be made to have a unitary sense experience, to have “perceptions” or “consciousness,” for this must occur before the mind generates the relationships involved in every sense experience—before the relationship between consciousness and the world is established.

Some may accuse me of speculating about internal processes. But who among us isn’t thus guilty? Who hasn’t wondered at the power and capacity of life? of the human mind? and whether the sources of nature, truth, and knowledge, are not to be found in our own head?

Modified from “Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death” by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman.

Lanza featured on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC’s) Ideas, one of the oldest and most respected radio programs in the world

BEYOND BIOCENTRISM: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of DeathHost Paul Kennedy has his understanding of reality turned-upside-down by Dr. Robert Lanza in this paradigm-shifting hour. Dr. Lanza provides a compelling argument for consciousness as the basis for the universe, rather than consciousness simply being its by-product.

Lanza’s Paper is the Cover Story of Annalen der Physik, which Published Einstein’s Theories of Relativity

In his papers on relativity, Einstein showed that time was relative to the observer. This new paper takes this one step further, arguing that the observer creates it. The paper shows that the intrinsic properties of quantum gravity and matter alone cannot explain the tremendous effectiveness of the emergence of time and the lack of quantum entanglement in our everyday world. Instead, it’s necessary to include the properties of the observer, and in particular, the way we process and remember information.

Dr. Robert Lanza selected for the 2014 TIME 100 list of the hundred most influential people in the world, along with Beyoncé, Hillary Clinton, Pope Francis, Vladimir Putin, Robert Redford, and other artists, pioneers, leaders, titans and icons.

Biocentrism Author, Robert Lanza Named One of the Top 50 “World Thinkers”

Robert Lanza selected as one of the top “World Thinkers 2015” by Prospect Magazine. The thinkers were chosen for “engaging in original and profound ways with the central questions of the world today,” as well as for their continuing significance for “this year’s biggest questions” (in economics, science, philosophy, cultural and social criticism and in politics).

From Wikipedia: The h-index measures both the productivity and impact of a scientist or scholar. A value for h of about 12 might be typical for advancement to tenure (associate professor) at major [US] research universities. A value of about 18 could mean a full professorship, 15–20 could mean a fellowship in the American Physical Society, and 45 or higher could mean membership in the United States National Academy of Sciences. According to Hirsch (who put forward the h-index), an h index of 20 is good, 40 is outstanding, and 60 is truly exceptional.

How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

Don’t miss the book that started it all, and shocked the world with its radical rethinking of the nature of reality.

In biocentrism, Robert Lanza and Bob Berman team up to turn the planet upside down with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.

Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe‒our own‒from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. It will shatter the reader’s ideas of life-time and space, and even death … the reader will never see reality the same again.

“Like “A Brief History of Time” it is indeed stimulating and brings biology into the whole. Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work… Most importantly, it makes you think.”—Nobel Prize Winner E. Donnall Thomas

Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death

Biocentrism shocked the world with a radical rethinking of the nature of reality.

But that was just the beginning.

“Beyond Biocentrism is an enlightening and fascinating journey that will forever alter your understanding of your own existence.”—Deepak Chopra

“Beyond Biocentrism is a joyride through the history of science and cutting-edge physics, all with a very serious purpose: to find the long-overlooked connection between the conscious self and the universe around us.”—Corey S. Powell, former editor-in-chief, Discover magazine

Robert Lanza is one of the most respected scientists in the world—a US News & World Report cover story called him a “genius” and a “renegade thinker,” even likening him to Einstein. Lanza has teamed with Bob Berman, the most widely read astronomer in the world, to produce Biocentrism, a revolutionary new view of the universe.

Every now and then a simple yet radical idea shakes the very foundations of knowledge. The startling discovery that the world was not flat challenged and ultimately changed the way people perceived themselves and their relationship with the world. For most humans of the 15th century, the notion of Earth as ball of rock was nonsense. The whole of Western, natural philosophy is undergoing a sea change again, increasingly being forced upon us by the experimental findings of quantum theory, and at the same time, towards doubt and uncertainty in the physical explanations of the universe’s genesis and structure. Biocentrism completes this shift in worldview, turning the planet upside down again with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.

In this paradigm, life is not an accidental byproduct of the laws of physics. Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe—our own—from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. Switching perspective from physics to biology unlocks the cages in which Western science has unwittingly managed to confine itself. Biocentrism will shatter the reader’s ideas of life—time and space, and even death. At the same time it will release us from the dull worldview of life being merely the activity of an admixture of carbon and a few other elements; it suggests the exhilarating possibility that life is fundamentally immortal.

The 21st century is predicted to be the Century of Biology, a shift from the previous century dominated by physics. It seems fitting, then, to begin the century by turning the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science with a simple idea discovered by one of the leading life-scientists of our age. Biocentrism awakens in readers a new sense of possibility, and is full of so many shocking new perspectives that the reader will never see reality the same way again.

Robert Lanza Worked (and Published Scientific Papers) with Some of the Greatest Scientists of the 20th Century

“I downloaded a digital copy of [biocentrism] in the privacy of my home, where no one could observe my buying or reading such a “New Agey” sort of cosmology book. Now, mind you, my motivation was not all that pure. It was my intention to read the book so I could more effectively refute it like a dedicated physicist was expected to…The book had the completely opposite effect on me. The views that Dr. Lanza presented in this book changed my thinking in ways from which there could never be retreat. Before I had actually finished reading the book, it was abundantly obvious to me that Dr. Lanza’s writings provided me with the pieces of perspective that I had been desperately seeking. Everything I had learned and everything I thought I knew just exploded in my mind and, as possibilities first erupted and then settled down, a completely new understanding emerged. The information I had accumulated in my mind hadn’t changed, but the way I viewed it did –in a really big way.”

— Scott M. Tyson, Physicist, The Unobservable Universe

“The heart of [biocentrism], collectively, is correct. On page 15 they say “the animal observer creates reality and not the other way around.” That is the essence of the entire book, and that is factually correct. It is an elementary conclusion from quantum mechanics. So what Lanza says in this book is not new. Then why does Robert have to say it at all? It is because we, the physicists, do NOT say it—or if we do say it, we only whisper it, and in private—furiously blushing as we mouth the words. True, yes; politically correct, hell no! Bless Robert Lanza for creating this book, and bless Bob Berman for not dissuading friend Robert from going ahead with it. Not that I think Robert Lanza could be dissuaded–this dude doesn’t dissuade! Lanza’s remarkable personal story is woven into the book, and is uplifting. You should enjoy this book, and it should help you on your personal journey to understanding.

“Having interviewed some of the most brilliant minds in the scientific world, I found Dr. Robert Lanza’s insights into the nature of consciousness original and exciting. His theory of biocentrism is consistent with the most ancient traditions of the world which say that consciousness conceives, governs, and becomes a physical world. It is the ground of our Being in which both subjective and objective reality come into existence…I agree more with [Lanza] than with anyone else that I have ever met.”

— Deepak Chopra, Bestselling Author (heralded by Time magazine as one of the top heroes and icons of the century)